SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — It’s halftime at the U.N. climate talks in Egypt, with negotiators still working on draft agreements before ministers arrive this week to push for a substantial deal to fight climate change.
The two-week meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh started with strong appeals from world leaders for greater efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to help poor nations cope with global warming.
Scientists say the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere needs to be halved by 2030 to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord. The 2015 pact set a target of ideally limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, but left it up to countries to decide how they want to do so.
Here is a look at the main issues on the table at the COP27 talks:
WHAT ABOUT THE U.S. AND CHINA? The top U.S. negotiator suggested that a planned meeting Monday between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sideline of the Group of 20 meeting in Bali could provide an important signal for the climate talks as they go into the home stretch.
With impacts from climate change already felt across the globe, there’s been a push for rich polluters to give more cash to help developing countries shift to clean energy and adapt to global warming; increasingly, there are also calls for compensation to pay for climate-related losses.
China is the biggest polluter by far right now, but the U.S. has the most historical pollution over time.
KEEPING COOL: A group of major emerging countries that includes oil- and gas-exporting nations has pushed back against explicit references to keeping the target of limiting global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius. Egypt, which is chairing the talks, convened a three-hour meeting Saturday in which the issue was raised several times.
“1.5 is a substantive issue,” said Wael Aboulmagd, a senior Egyptian negotiator, adding that it was “not just China” that had raised questions about the language used to refer to the target. Still, he was hopeful of finding a way of securing a “maximum possible advance” on reducing emissions by the meeting’s close.
CUTTING EMISSIONS: Negotiators are trying to put together a mitigation program that would capture the various measures countries have committed to in order to reduce emissions, including for specific sectors like energy and transport. Many of these pledges are not formally part of the U.N. process, meaning they cannot easily be scrutinized at the annual meeting. A draft agreement circulating early Saturday had large sections still unresolved. Some countries want the plan to be valid for only one year, while others say a longer-term roadmap is needed.
U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS: While all countries are equal at the U.N. meeting, in practice little gets done without the approval of the world’s two biggest emitters, China and the United States. Beijing canceled formal dialogue on the climate following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, and relations have been frosty since. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said Saturday that he had held only informal discussions with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua lately. “I think we’re both waiting to see how things go with the G-20,” he told reporters.
